Song of Blades and Heroes - Dragon!

My youngest son was with me over the Bank Holiday weekend just gone so we decided to play a quick game of Song of Blades and Heroes. I was in the mood to try something a little different from normal so decided upon using a dragon figure I painted up several years ago to see how fielding a single big monster would affect the way the game plays.

My son used one of his old warbands again, and to make up the points I added a ghoul to the 268 point dragon to make my warband the 300 points required. To be honest I didn't really want to and it nearly cost me the game at one point.

The dragon and the ghoul...

268 points of dragon (and 32 points of ghoul)

The humans...

The barbarians

The humans won initiative and moved up to try to grab the magic item tokens before the dragon could do so. The dragon rolled three successes and due to its Long Move quickly landed on a token that turned out to be the treasure (a Belt of Strength - that could be used in the next game if we so choose). The ghoul followed on slowly to give support and maybe to carry the treasure off the board in case something went awry.

The humans moved up to attack the dragon in the hope that they could wrest the treasure from its steely talons.

The barbarians, not being susceptible to Terror, were able to charge the dragon and ghoul and give combat. Despite the huge advantage that the dragon had in combat it could only manage to push back one of its opponents this turn.

The following turn, however, this changed and the first of the barbarians fell to the dragon's magical abilities.

Over the next few turns the barbarians began to fall at a rate of one a turn. However, at one point the ghoul was killed and, as the dragon's army had reached 50% of its original size, had to take a Morale check. This got me worried as I only had to roll a single one on the three dice and the dragon would have to retreat a Long Move, which would have taken it off the board and granted victory to the humans. Luckily I didn't roll a one but it did make me ponder how to use small-sized armies in future.

The dragon steadily mopped up the barbarians until they had to take a Morale check for the loss of their leader. One or two retreated away (one off the board) and directly after that they took another Morale test for hitting 50% of army size due to the desertion. Two more ran away leaving just a couple of archers. One advanced to take on the dragon from a vantage point at the ford on the river - he was turned to steam by its breath weapon along with half the river. Somehow the last remaining archer avoided retreating despite the Gruesome Kill and tried his best to attack the dragon, but the Initiative roll for the next turn went in favour of the dragon and the archer was stomped on.

So, it was a victory to the dragon with the entire barbarian army being killed or routing.

Observations from this game:

• During the entire game of 10 turns, I (the dragon) only won Initiative 3 times, and then not until the 7th turn!
• Ganging up works, as does volley shooting (unfortunately not well enough to take down a dragon)
• 268 points for one figure is a lot to spend, but it seemed to work
• Keep to the middle of the board if you only have a few warriors on your side to prevent routing, especially with a Long Move figure

Going forward, I think a dragon should be a solitary creature - the ghoul nearly cost me the game. I also think at this level the game becomes a little unbalanced. Maybe the opposition needed to have more men or the values of the warriors against the dragon needed to be more heroic with Traits that negate some of the dragon's abilities (e.g. barbarians are immune to Terror, which really helped)?

My son was not upset at all by losing this game - he was happy to see how it played out as he wanted to find out how a dragon would fare too. I guess he will want to take a dragon next time we play.

Historical Holiday Interlude - Rhodes

During the first half of July this year, my partner and I decided to take a trip to Rhodes. We had already been to Cyprus in March and taken in lots of (pre)historical goodness in the way of ancient tombs and Greek and Roman remains, so this time would bring us a little more towards the present day with the most intact medieval city in Europe. It also linked nicely with the Knights of the Order of St. John.

Not knowing much about Rhodes other than the story of the persecution of the Knights Templar in 1307 and the subsequent fiscal attacks on the Knights of Rhodes in the aftermath of that act (apparently to break the financial power of the two orders), we decided to explore a bit of the old town to find out more.

From the couple of museums we visited we discovered that the city of Rhodes is one of the most intact medieval cities in Europe and that the old town and the Grand Master's Palace are the two main attractions in the north of the island - we didn't get to see any of the other fortresses and towers on the rest of the island as this was to be mostly a holiday of relaxation (sun, sea and sleep).

City Walls (as seen from the harbour)

 

The Harbour defences

 

 

 

Grand Master's Palace (as seen from the harbour)

Anyway, without going into all the details, we explored a lot of the old medieval town, palace and city walls and learned a lot of the history of the island and the Order of the Knights of St. John. These details may come in handy for future gaming with knightly orders in their historical context, or for fantasy versions in an imaginary world. Often, a real institution's history and organisation can be a great place to start to base a fantasy one on.

Surprisingly, other than appearances on a few tee-shirts and fridge magnets, not much is made of the Colossus of Rhodes. I wanted to find out a little more about this Wonder of the Ancient World, but other than it fell to an earthquake in ~226/225 BC, I only really found out that it didn't straddle the harbour as I always thought but was situated to one side. It represented the sun god Helios, and was apparently 33 meters tall and made of bronze. It was raised to celebrate a victory over Demetrius of Macedon. Sadly, the remnants were gathered up in the 7th century and melted down. What a sad way to end its life.

Being a mostly fantasy game player, I thought that the machinations of the order and their enemies could make for a great political game, especially if I could use the iconography of the Colossus as part of the set-up. Then, when I found out that they had their own dragon myth I got even more excited about gaming possibilities. Apparently around the year 1332 a dragon terrorised the people of Rhodes. Many knights went to Mal Paso (Bad Pass) to slay the enormous, long-tailed beast with scales of metal that no arrow or spear could pierce, but none returned. As a result, Grand Master Helion de Villeneuve forbade anyone else from attempting to slay the monster, but, as always in these tales, a young knight, Dieudonne de Gozon disobeyed the order and set about defeating it. To cut a long story short, he took a year out from his knightly duties to fashion a replica of the dragon at his father's castle in Languedoc to get his horse and dogs used to the sight of such a beast. Having also learned of a small, vulnerable unplated part of its underbelly, he set off to slay it. When he encountered the dragon, he was knocked off his horse by its long tail. However, he was able to pierce its soft underbelly with a spear, but the monster's dead body fell on him, trapping him beneath. He was hauled out by joyous villagers and taken to Grand Master Helion de Villeneuve who was going to punish him for disobeying orders, but let him off due to the cries of the populace and promoted him to Grand Master instead. Apparently the dragon's head was on display on the Sea Gate until at least the 17th century when it was written about by two travellers!

Dragon!

This one took a while, but I think the journey has been worthwhile. Below are a few pictures of an old magazine cover plastic dragon figure that I thought would come in useful one day as a gaming miniature. The magazine was a Hachette partworks called Beasts and Beings, if I recall correctly, dated from around 2008. I think I bought the first two issues, but all the subsequent figures were no good for my gaming purposes. The magazines have since been consigned to the recycling bin as they were not that great to be honest; kids would have loved them though.

The model was initially (rather inexpertly) painted red, with translucent red wings. The egg was white. Unfortunately I could not find a picture on the web of the dragon in its original colour scheme, although if I really tried I probably could, but I cannot be bothered to spend too much time in tracking one down. Anyway, I didn't want to stick to the standard red dragon scheme, so decided to go down the green dragon route purely based on the Lord of the Rings ditty about The Green Dragon Inn (sung by Merry and Pippin in the aftermath of one of the battles in Rohan if I remember rightly) which happened to be going round my head at the time. Anyway, first up is the undercoated version...

And, the dragon in a carousel-style series of pictures to show her off from all angles...

Although the painting has been completed, I still need to varnish her to protect her from rough handling and the elements. When I eventually get around to buying some gloss paint on varnish, and some matt spray varnish for the skeletons, I will also use them for her.

She is mounted on an old CD to give you a sense of her size. The basing is a mixture of almost everything I have; GW texture basing, sand, small pieces of gravel, flock, grass tufts, flower tufts (white and purple) and some tree scatter flock. I was hoping to get a small treasure hoard on there, but I think her egg is enough treasure for anyone to plunder. If I feel the inclination, I may add some treaure at a later date. At least as she is, she will be ideally suited to wilderness encounter scenarios.

So, what will I be able to use her for? I was hoping that I could use a small dragon in games of Frostgrave or any other fantasy style solo/co-op game, as well as in Dragon Rampant as a war beast of some kind, and Lord of the Rings as a cave drake or something similar. Hopefully I can find all sorts of uses for her going forward. At the moment she is sitting on my bookshelves looking lovely, and I am day dreaming over scenarios to include her in.

Next week will hopefully see me carry on with prepping more Otherworld skeletons, putting some more paint onto the undead riders and starting on my son's Gondor warband. Lots to do to keep me busy.

Skeletons and a Dragon

After the brief interlude of articles on dungeon aesthetics, I am slowly getting back to what I want to do with Frostgrave. I have begun digging through my unpainted backlog and came up with some fitting adversaries for Balthazar and his gang of ne'er-do-wells. As mentioned previously, I seem to have many more historical and human miniatures than I do monster stuff. I will see to remedying that by looking through the rulebooks to see what I have lying around that can be used and maybe look into purchasing some additional minis to bolster the numbers.

After the "mundane" (i.e. not supernatural) encounters on the way to Felstad have been overcome (more on Balthazar's adventures to come over the next few weeks), the first taste of the supernatural makes itself known as the frozen city gets closer. The overspill of magic from eons past causes more supernatural beings to spring into being and this will come as a shock to our intrepid party when they are first encountered.

I was able to dig out a couple of blisters of Otherworld Miniatures' Skeletons. I bought these many moons ago at a Salute show I went to and never got around to doing anything with them. I decided it was high time I got them out of the blisters, glued up and ready for some paint.

Here they are glued up as per the designs/images on the website. I may buy another few packs (they also do armoured skeletons) to make up the numbers (and provide more unique poses by swapping around the weapon and shield arms) as they are quite an easy adversary in Frostgrave (only 1 hit point each) and will come in handy for many other games.

I wasn't too enamoured by the shields that came with them, so they went into my bits box. The shields in themselves are OK, but the two different blisters contained different styles and I wanted them all to match as if they came from the same burial mound/crypt and/or era. So, I looked around in my bits box and found some alternatives from Conquest Games that fitted my vision better - plus I have more spares of the same, so if I do get more skeletons, then they can all be armed (shielded) in the same way.

I will try to get these undercoated in the next couple of days, but I will need to wait for a break in the weather if I want to use my usual spray can. I do have plenty of normal black paint, so I may just water that down a bit and brush it on.

 

This brings me onto the next bunch of miniatures that I sorted out; a few dragons and some trolls. The trolls are the three cave trolls and Burdhur, the hill troll chieftain that I have in my Lord of the Rings collection (I will do a separate post for these when I get around to painting them). I got out the greenstuff putty and filled the gaps around the joins between the arms and body, but I had some left over; what to do with it?

Luckily I had a couple of very old Ral Partha dragons (a blue dragon and some kind of Chinese style dragon - again, a later post will detail these) and a large plastic model from a magazine I bought the first issue of many years ago.

Now, I cannot remember what the magazine was called as I no longer have a copy of it, but I do recall that all the models that came with it were of differing scales, and that the dragon above was the only one worth collecting. I had peviously base coated it and stuck it onto a CD as a base, but where the undercoat spray missed, there was still a lot of the original colouring of the model showing through. I touched this up with watered down paint and used the remainder of the greenstuff to attach the wings more securely. This also allowed me to blend the wings to the body a little more (there were fairly large gaps).

I actually really like this miniature, so I will try to give it a good paint job whenever I get around to it. As to colour scheme, I am not entirely sure which way to go. The original colour was red, but I find that too cliched. Maybe I will go for some kind of green/brown mix, so it looks like it could be some long-lost antediluvian fire-breathing lizard with wings. Who knows? I will also take a fair bit of care and give the base a bit more attention than my usual sand, flock and tufts. Maybe I will have it guarding some treasure as well as its egg?

Hopefully next post I will have some of these at least partially painted.